128110 VO Popular and Media Cultures VO / Cultural Studies - MA M01 (2026S)

Stemming out of a close cooperation between University of Vienna and FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, this lecture series equips MA students with a theoretically grounded, media-literate understanding of how medicine operates as a cultural system of images, spaces, and narratives - and how these shape lived realities in powerful, often invisible ways.

Medicine has never been a purely scientific enterprise. It is deeply embedded in cultural imaginaries, visual regimes, and aesthetic practices: from anatomical atlases, hospital architecture, and early medical photography to contemporary imaging technologies, and artistic engagements with illness and care. This lecture asks how visual culture does not merely represent medicine, but actively produces medical knowledge, norms of the body, and ideas of health, normality, risk, and deviance.

Students will be introduced to key theoretical approaches from Cultural Studies, Visual Culture Studies, and Medical Humanities (e.g. Foucault, Sontag, Mirzoeff, Haraway, Garland-Thomson, Gilman). Through case studies drawn from photography, film, exhibition culture, architecture, and digital media, the course will examine:
- the medical gaze and regimes of visibility
- photography as a tool of diagnosis, classification, and control
- visualisations of illness, pain, and vulnerability
- race, gender, class, and disability in medical imagery
- hospitals, sanatoria, and psychiatric institutions as cultural spaces
- art as critique, care practice, and alternative knowledge
- contemporary visual cultures of health (self-tracking, social media, AI, imaging technologies)

A distinctive feature of the course is its engagement with Viennese institutions as living archives of medical and visual culture. These include, where possible, Foto Arsenal Wien, the Josephinum (Museum of the History of Medicine), Gugging (Art/Brut and psychiatry), and Steinhof / Otto Wagner Hospital. These sites allow students to connect theory with material, architectural, and curatorial practices and to understand medicine as a historically and culturally situated system of knowledge.

The lecture format combines theoretically grounded input with close readings of images, films, exhibitions, and architectural spaces. Students will acquire the conceptual tools needed to analyse visual material critically, to recognise processes of naturalisation and stereotyping, and to reflect on the ethical and political implications of seeing bodies in medical contexts. Particular emphasis is placed on the relevance of these questions for future teachers and cultural mediators.